Minolta X-370

This was the camera the store talked you into when you walked in asking about an OM-1 or an AE-1. Cheaper than both, and one of the high-volume budget SLRs that put a lot of first-time photographers behind a viewfinder in the late 1980s. Minolta built it to a price, and it sold well on that basis.

The X-370 is aperture-priority at heart. You set the f-stop, the body picks the shutter speed, and a row of LEDs down the right side of the finder tells you what it chose. No match-needle to chase, no manual-override anxiety. There is a manual mode if you want it, but the point of the thing was that you did not have to think about it. The finder is bright enough, with a split-image center and a microprism collar, and the focusing screen is honest rather than dazzling. The shutter is electronic and cloth, running from a long four seconds down to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60. It fires with a soft, muffled action, not the sharp snap you get from a metal-blade body.

Now the catch. The X-370 does not work without batteries. At all. It runs on two LR44 or SR44 cells (or a single 3V lithium), and a dead pair turns the camera into a paperweight. No mechanical backup speed, nothing. That is the trade you make for the simplicity. The older all-mechanical SRT bodies will fire stone dead; this one will not. Carry spares.

It anchors the Minolta SR mount, which means you are buying into one of the great cheap lens systems in photography. MC and MD Rokkor glass is plentiful and underpriced because Minolta lost the autofocus war and collectors drifted elsewhere. A 50mm f/1.7 Rokkor on this body costs almost nothing and renders beautifully, and that bargain is most of the reason people still pick these up. Students load one for a photo class, street shooters grab one as a knockabout, and nobody worries about scratching it.

The honest weakness, beyond the battery dependence, is that the meter is a plain center-weighted average and it gets fooled exactly when you need it most. Backlit portraits, snow, a bright sky over a dark street, and the body will happily underexpose your subject into mud. This is the case for a handheld reading: with the Zone Light Meter app you take a spot reading off the face or the shadow you care about, place it where you want it, and dial that exposure in manually instead of letting the LEDs chase the bright background. The automation is fine for an even scene and a liability in a hard one.

Today these sell for very little, often body-and-lens for less than a roll of film and processing. People cross-shop them against the Canon AE-1 and the Pentax K1000, and the X-370 usually wins on price while giving up the K1000's battery-free stubbornness. Buy one for the glass, keep a spare pair of cells in the bag, and it will serve you a long time.